News headlines in January 2009

After strong polling for the provincial elections Saturday, Iraqis are looking out for new signposts of political recovery from the U.S.-led invasion and occupation.

The vast majority of the world's governments effectively deny citizens basic information they need to understand how public monies are being spent, according to a new report released here Sunday by the International Budget Partnership (IBP), a Washington-based project that works with civil society groups to promote government transparency and improve accountability.

A rare sense of optimism rose in Mogadishu in the early hours of Jan. 31 as people learnt that the leader of a moderate faction of the Union of Islamic Courts, Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, had been elected as head the Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

U.S. television coverage of the recent three-week conflict in the Gaza Strip failed to tell both sides of the story, according to a number of media analysts.

Civil society in this port city, victim of the Nov. 26-29 terrorist attacks and host to the 2004 World Social Forum, has one question to ask - will the movement seriously address terrorism?

The suicide car bomb that struck Mogadishu Jan. 24, killing at least twenty people and injuring nearly fifty others is an explosive comment on the failure of the Ethiopian military deployment to Somalia two years ago to oust Islamist forces it believed represented 'a clear and present danger' to Ethiopia.

The spirits of a nation were lifted when Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the main section of the Movement for Democratic Change declared that his party would enter a unity government under terms negotiated at a special regional summit.

One of the few indicators on the rise at this time of economic and financial crisis is the level of repudiation expressed about those responsible for the disaster, and about the institutions sponsoring them.

'True socialism is feminist,' and is already being built, said Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, standing next to three other South American presidents, all of them men, at a dialogue that took place Thursday at the World Social Forum (WSF).

A year after they were allegedly subjected to torture by the Thai army, two young men from the country’s troubled southern provinces have done what no other victim of similar abuse in the area has dared to do - go to court.